- Image by Tama Leaver via Flickr
How many times have you received a batch of emails waiting for you on a Monday morning, and you either skim quickly through them or delete them without even opening them?
Don’t worry – you’re not alone.
Figures show that Mondays and Fridays are the two least popular days of the week for people opening emails – hardly surprising when you consider both days are either side of the weekend. So why do many businesses still send out so many of their most important emails on these days?
Email IS Marketing
For example, if you wanted to promote your great new summer gardening tool, why would you send an email to your customers saying that you have a new gardening tool if they “want to check it out”? Your marketing team wouldn’t be best pleased, for one thing – inviting someone to look at something is a lot different from providing them with a call to action to look at it instead.
- “Our new sit-down lawnmower is now available at our online showroom.” Hardly enticing, yet so many businesses send this exact type of email out.
- “Take the hard work out of gardening – sit down and enjoy the view as our Rotovator Mobile Mower does the work for you. Special introductory offer here.” It’s a far more persuasive message, and offering a clickable link where it says “here” will entice people even more, particularly if you include an image of the mower in the email.
Yet both these examples will lose any effectiveness they may have if the email is sent without taking any notice of the time it’s sent. This is true for both days of the week and time of the year that your email is sent.
Time is Money
The whole point of you having a dedicated marketing team – or, at the very least, a marketing plan – is that you want to maximize your Return on Investment as well as sales opportunities at key points of your business calendar. So why would you send out a Christmas flyer at Easter? Surprisingly, many companies fall into this trap all too easily. Yes, it’s good to get a head start on the competition, but not at the expense that everyone has forgotten about you when it comes to your busy sales period.
You need to ensure that your email marketing strategy is combined with the marketing team, and research that shows the best time for you to reach your customers.
Event – Summer Sale – Begins June 1st – Email Marketing Begins March 1st – Follow Up Emails Commence May 1st
This is just a basic example of an effective timetable. However, what it does show clearly is that the most effective times to start a direct marketing email campaign is between 8-12 weeks before the actual event itself begins. This ensures that both your existing and potential new customers are aware that you have something big planned, and they will then be primed to expect follow-up information as the event draws closer.
This is the same for anything – a Christmas promotion should be advertised mid-September to mid-October, with follow-ups in November. Or an Easter promotion can begin in early January. You know you have the product that will sell – you just need to make sure you have the timing.
8 Days a Week
Despite the best intentions of The Beatles, there aren’t eight days in a week. However, by choosing the right days to send your email advertising your upcoming event, you can achieve the same results with just a couple of key days as you would with an extra day of the week.
A recent Email Marketing Metrics Report, which looked at the emailing trends of July-December 2008, showed the best days to send emails if you want them to be read. Contrary to popular belief, Monday is not a prime day – in fact, it’s one of the worst days of the week for emails to be read. Despite this, the two busiest days of the week for sending emails last year were Mondays and Fridays – yet for all the emails that were sent on these days, only 4.01% and 3.81% of them respectively were opened.
Compare that to emails that were sent throughout the week – Tuesdays saw 4.76% of emails opened, while Wednesday and Thursday saw 4.2% and 4.24% respectively, despite less emails being sent on these days. These figures show why the companies that continue to send key emails at the beginning and end of the week are experiencing lower sales conversions.
Taking these figures into account, planning your emails to be sent on the more profitable days seems obvious.
Doesn’t it?
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Great points. So many times companies put together marketing collateral and just load it up to send — without targeting exactly when and how the recipients of those emails will open them.
Interesting stuff, Danny.
It is amusing how companies still fall into these traps despite the obvious flaws thereof. It would be interesting to hear their responses were they to be asked whether their propensity to engage such emails was as high on a Monday or Friday, as on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.
Unfortunately, this would appear to be yet another example of traditional marketers attempting to drag their ‘old marketing’ mentality into the 21st Century. It is no longer appropriate to ‘dictate’ a message, principally because we now have the capacity to reject anything that doesn’t instantly capture our attention. Old marketing simply doesn’t cut it anymore.
TLR
Interesting Danny! While I don't profess to represent every traditional marketer that has made the foray into email marketing – I can tell you what we did for our CPG client. We researched and found that most women 25-49 still do their grocery shopping on weekends. So we made the connection that they would want coupons, promos, etc. in their inbox on Friday, confirmed again by more secondary research. We consistently delivered on a Friday for 11 months in 2008. We also consistently received an open rate of 38-41% with a click-through of 43-54% (except for one stinker of 20% clicked) We switched to a Wed. delivery for December and our open rate was 47%, clicked was 43.9. In January, our open fell to 39.1% but 48.3% clicked. I feel pretty good about these rates and what we are doing.
And that's the big difference, Kat – you did excellent research but didn't just leave it there, you followed up on it as well. Obviously there is a market for Friday emails (though most businesses don't like them), and you used that to run a solid campaign. Businesses should look at your model and learn from it.